I’ve been following a couple of 2011 developments that together may determine the next big technology winners and losers. To get your click, I’ve been obscure in my title.

Spiders refers to the battle for control of the webs that connect us all together. Google won the first race by connecting webs of content, and now the second race is on for control of the social web. Facebook dominates the personal market, while LinkedIn has carved out a niche with professionals and now challenges its big cousin. Finally, latecomer Google (anybody see the irony?) may just sneak up on both by capitalizing on their respective weaknesses.

So what?

Consider this: The winner will control the web of social data. What people like, who they know who likes similar stuff, and where these potential customers are. This is powerful stuff that companies are just beginning to figure out. For example, a mobile app identifies five people in your condo complex who are big scuba divers, and one is on the boat trip with you right now. By helping you make connnections, the app’s developer can now sell marketing data to dive boat charters that then can offer you a group discount to come back together with your other new connections. Clearly, the company in control of this data will be in the center of a market worth a mind-blowing amount of money.

Elephants is an allusion to Hadoop and Horton, two pachyderms that represent that growing interest in big data technology. Eric Baldeschwieler, former Hadoop project leader at Yahoo and now CEO of Hortonworks, went so far as to state, “. . . We anticipate that within five years, more than half the world's data will be stored in Apache Hadoop.”

From my first days as a baby architect, I was spoon-fed the idea that enterprise data management (EDM) was the solution to our data woes. Some call it enterprise information management or other names that mean a holistic approach to managing data that is business led and centered on stewardship and governance. The DMBOK provides a picture that describes this concept very well — check it out.

Here’s the problem: Most firms are not able to internalize this notion and act accordingly. There are myriad reasons why this is so, and we can all list off a bunch of them if we put our minds to it. Top of my list is that the lure of optimizing for next quarter often outweighs next year’s potential benefits.

Here’s another problem: Most EAs cannot do much about this. We are long-term, strategic people who can clearly see the benefits of EDM, which may lead us to spend a lot of time promoting the virtues of this approach. As a result, we get bloody bruises on our heads and waste time that could be spent doing more-productive things.

I do think that taking a long-term, holistic approach is the best thing to do; in my recently published report "Big Opportunities In Big Data," I encourage readers to maintain this attitude when considering data at extreme scale. We need to pursue short-term fixes as well. Let me go a step further and say that making short-term progress on nagging data management issues with solutions that take months not years is more important to our firms than being the EDM town crier. Hopefully my rationale is clear: We can be more effective this way as long as our recommendations keep the strategic in mind.

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When we get used to something, we often think it will never change, but it does eventually; who bought a house in 2006 and assumed the value would surely keep going up?

We are working at an architectural inflection point. The signals are all around us – cloud, big data, mobility, smart computing, etc. While each of these appears to be only modestly connected, I think together they signify a major shift in how business gets done and in the architecture that supports it. If true, this means the tried-and-true Business-Data-Applications-Technology model architected and delivered by central IT will not serve us much longer.

Consider the following:

Big and complex are here to stay. In the past we strove for simplicity because we did not have the techniques and technology to deal with the world as it is – infinitely complex. Read Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. The cloud has brought the power of distributed, elastic computing to bear on enormous problems, and this trend will continue. Will central IT continue to grow in response to the increasing size and complexity of technology problems, or will a different model arise?

The cloud and the App Internet are two sides of the same coin. The cloud is about optimizing the power of centralized data processing, while the App Internet is about exploiting the enormous power of mobile devices on the periphery. What happens when we figure out how these work together? Can we create a smart grid across mobile devices that also leverages cloud resources? What can we accomplish when apps no longer live in central data centers that we own and control?

Today we’re kicking off Forrester's IT Forum 2011 at The Palazzo in Las Vegas. Prepare for three exciting days of keynote presentations and track sessions focused on business and technology alignment. Use the Twitter widget below to follow the Forum conversation by tracking our event hashtag #ITF11 on Twitter. Attendees are encouraged to tweet throughout the Forum and to tweet any questions for our keynote presenters to #ITF11.

Has anybody noticed that processor speed has stopped doubling every 18 months? This occurred to me the other day, so I took some time to figure out why and draw some conclusions about Moore's law and the impacts of continued advances in chip technology. Here what I've come up with: 1) Moore's law is still valid, but the way processor power is measured has changed, 2) disk-based memory is going the way of the cassette tape, and 3) applications will move into the cloud.

We have pushed semiconductor technology to its physical limits, including our ability to cool chips and the speed of light. As a result, chip manufacturers have turned to multicore processing technology rather than pure chip and bus speed. Now the power of a microprocessor is judged by the number of cores it contains — and the number of cores on a single chip will continue to increase for the near future.

So what? Extra cores per chip means more parallel processing to speed through operations — so parallel is the future.

Two other trends are also important to understand my conclusions:

RAM keeps getting more powerful and cheaper.

As the number of cores in a chip goes up, its ability to process data begins to exceed bus technology’s ability to deliver it. Bus speed is governed by Moore’s law.

Just attended a Big Data symposium courtesy of IBM and thought I’d share a few insights, as probably many of you have heard the term but are not sure what it means to you.

No. 1: Big Data is about looking out of the front window when you drive, not the rearview mirror. What do I mean? The typical decision-making process goes something like this: capture some data, integrate it together, analyze the clean and integrated data, make some decisions, execute. By the time you decide and execute, the data may be too old and have cost you too much. It’s a bit like driving by looking out of your rearview mirror.

Big Data changes this paradigm by allowing you to iteratively sift through data at extreme scale in the wild and draw insights closer to real time. This is a very good thing, and companies that do it well will beat those that don’t.

No. 2: Big is not just big volume. The term “Big Data” is a misnomer and it is causing some confusion. Several of us here at Forrester have been saying for a while that it is about the four “V’s" of data at extreme scale - volume, velocity, variety and variability. I was relieved when IBM came up with three of them; variability being the one they left out.

Some of the most interesting examples we discussed centered on the last 3 V’s – we heard from a researcher who is collecting data on vital signs from prenatal babies and correlating changes in heart rates with early signs of infection. According to her, they collect 90 million data points per patient per day! What do you do with that stream of information? How do you use it to save lives? It is a Big Data Problem.

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As I dig into my initial research, it dawned on me – some technology trends are having an impact on information management/data warehouse (DW) architectures, and EAs should consider these when planning out their firm’s road map. The next thought I had – this wasn’t completely obvious when I began. The final thought? As the EA role analyst covering emerging technology and trends, this is the kind of material I need to be writing about.

Let me explain:

No. 1: Big Data expands the scope of DWs. A challenge with typical data management approaches is that they are not suited to dealing with data that is poorly structured, sparsely attributed, and high-volume. For example, today’s DW appliances boast abilities to handle up to a 100 TB of volume, but the data must be transformed into a highly structured format to be useful. Big Data technology applies the power of massively parallel distributed computing to capture and sift through data gone wild – that is, data at an extreme scale of volume, velocity, and variability. Big Data technology does not deliver insight, however – insights depend on analytics that result from combing the results of things like Hadoop MapReduce jobs with manageable “small data” already in your DW.

Greetings — thanks for taking the time to read my inaugural blog! Let me introduce myself by way of continuing a discussion that I started at Practicing EA and CIO.com on innovation and technology that I think strikes at the heart of our challenges as enterprise architects. It also provides a good context for my future research, which I discuss at the end.

Closing The Innovation Gap

In part 1 of this post, I claim that a gap opened while we were fighting the overly complex, expensive current state and trying to help our business partners innovate with new technology.

The gap – We cannot deliver new technology and innovation quickly or cheaply enough.

Shadow IT Is The Symptom, Not The Cause

The Symptom – We often blame Shadow IT and manual workarounds for increases in complexity, reduction in quality of service, and obscuring true technology costs. These are symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself.

The Cause – Business users know more about what they need and when they need it and are the most motivated to solve their problems now, not once the budget cycle gets around to funding a project. Central IT, where most EAs practice, is a knowledge store for designing enterprise-scale systems but is constrained in its ability to deliver.

Today, IBM announced the next release of its BPM suite environment, dubbed IBM Business Process Manager V7.5. This version represents IBM’s first attempt at unifying the core Lombardi Teamworks platform with IBM’s legacy WebSphere Process Server environment.

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid outin our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi. With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

Several recent reports on Forrester.com start with the sentence: "EA organizations often toil out of the limelight . . . " There are fewer and fewer reasons why this should be the case.

We hear fewer stories of EA teams as purely "the standards police" or with "their heads in the clouds, not producing anything useful." We hear more and more stories of EA teams changing how business and IT plan, taking the lead in application simplification and rationalization, or being the broker for innovation. Infoworld and Forrester want to recognize these success stories with the 2011 Enterprise Architecture Award.

Discover Financial created an EA repository that aggregates information from its Service Catalog, Fixed Asset, PPM, and Business Goals to provide decision-making insights that saved more than $1M of avoided costs.

Aetna used its Business Capability Map to combine more than 30 business unit strategies and road maps, highlighting common opportunities and gaps that it then used for its annual planning.